The subject matter disclosed herein relates to medical imaging and patient monitoring systems that use wireless communication to exchange data between host and client devices within the system.
In current wireless medical imaging environments, X-ray imaging systems typically include an imaging subsystem base station and a detector. The imaging subsystem may be a fixed or mobile base station host and may employ one or more detachable or wireless detector clients. Similarly, wireless patient monitoring systems include a patient monitoring base station host that may communicate with one or more wireless sensor clients. For most wireless communication standards, including Wi-Fi and ultra-wide band (UWB), the total allowed frequency range for the standard is divided into various channels that are each represented by a respective channel number. Each channel operates relatively independently of the others, allowing devices to be configured to use specific channels within the standard to limit interference with one another during communication. Both the total frequency range and individual channels within the range may be regulated and allowed or disallowed by local governing bodies in a particular geographic region.
Like many methods of communication, wireless data connections are subject to potentially noisy channels as a result of environmental electromagnetic interference. Environmental noise can be a particular problem in the hospital setting, where numerous pieces of electrical equipment and wireless communication devices are operating in close proximity to one another. To further exacerbate the problem, the data throughput requirements for wireless medical systems can be at times both sizable and inflexible.
As the quality of a wireless connection between a host and a client begins to degrade due to channel noise, bits of data within data packages can be interpreted erroneously upon receipt due to the effects of noise on the data signal. While various data checking and verification schemes allow such errors to be detected, detecting such an error will result in a request for, and a resend of, the entire erroneous data package, lowering the data throughput of the system as a result of the additional overhead.